Toddler survives Yemenia Airbus crash
Plane went down with 153 passengers on board
Last Updated: Tuesday, June 30, 2009 | 6:03 AM ET
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Relatives and friends of passengers of a crashed Yemenia Air flight arrive at a crisis center at Charles de Gaulle airport near Paris on Tuesday. (Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters)
A toddler has been found alive amid the debris of a passenger jet that crashed into the Indian Ocean early Tuesday with 153 people on board, officials said.

The Yemenia Air Flight IYE626 was en route from the Yemeni capital of San'a to the island nation of Comoros when it went down over the Indian Ocean between the southeastern African coast and Madagascar in the early hours of Tuesday, officials said.

Comoros police said three bodies had been recovered so far and a small child has been pulled from the water alive. There is no word on other survivors.

Several bodies have been spotted floating in the water off the archipelago of three islands about 2,900 kilometres south of Yemen, said Mohammed Abdul Qader, a Yemeni civil aviation deputy.

Three search and rescue boats have been sent to an area about 30 km from the Moroni airport where the plane was expected to land, Abdul Qader said.

Some pieces of debris from the plane have also been recovered, said Rachida Abdullah, a police officer who works with the airport immigration department in Comoros.

Bad weather
Officials said they lost contact with the plane about five minutes before it was supposed to land on the main island of Grand Comore.

French Transport Minister Dominique Bussereau said poor weather in the region, where wind speed was 60 km per hour and there were choppy seas, may have played a role in the crash.

An Airbus statement said the twin-engine wide-body jet — identified by the serial number 535 — went into service in 1990 and had accumulated 51,900 flight hours. It has been operated by Yemenia since 1999. The company is sending a team of specialist to Comoros.

The Airbus was the second one to crash into the sea this month. An Air France Airbus A330 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, killing 228 people on the night of May 31.

Yemeni, French and Comoron officials are jointly co-ordinating an investigation into the Yemenia crash.

66 French nationals on board
Officials said the majority of the passengers were from the Comoros islands and were returning home from Paris.

The French military is sending a patrol boat, a frigate, a reconnaissance ship and a military transport plane to the crash site, said military spokesman Christophe Prazuck.

Divers and medical personnel will be made available to help in the search, Prazuck said.

A crisis centre has been set up in Paris and Marseille, where about 67 people originally departed and then stopped to pick up more passengers, according to officials.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said 66 of the passengers were French and expressed "sincere condolences" to the victims' families.

The French Embassy in Moroni has also been mobilized to help families, Kouchner said.

"There is considerable dismay," Stephane Salord, the consul general of the Comoros in the Provence-Alps-Cote d'Azur region of France. "These are families that, each year on the eve of summer, leave Marseille and the region to rejoin their families in the Comoros and spend their holidays."

RESCUERS HAVE located one of the black box of the Yemeni plane, which went down in the Indian Ocean on Tuesday (June 30). The plane was flying from Yemen's capital Sanaa to the Comoros islands but crashed down due to bad weather.

A government spokesperson said that the radio signal of the black box was picked up by an aerial petrol, 40 km from Grand Comore.

Except one teenage girl, who was rescued hours after crash, remaining 152 people on board are feared to have perished.
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Identified as Baya Bakari, the girl is said to be out of danger and recovering well after the accident.

Ironically, the aircraft had been banned from entering France after authorities had found technical faults in the plane. Most of the passengers had boarded the ill fated plane in Saana after they arrived from Paris or Marseille on another Yemenia aircraft.

A French vessel has been pressed into the service to search for the black box. Meanwhile, officials said that chances of finding a survivor were very slim.

Selected abstract.
"One of the flight recorders from the Yemeni aircraft has been located and attempts to recover the black box, which should hold information on why the plane crashed, will begin today."

A submarine has picked up signals from the black boxes of the Yemenia Airways plane that crashed near the Comoros Islands last week, French investigators say.

The investigating agency BEA said the signals were detected Sunday morning during an underwater search.

The Airbus A310 went down Tuesday in the Indian Ocean as it was approaching the Cormoros coast, killing 152 people.

A 12-year-old girl from Paris is the only survivor of the crash. Bahia Bakari suffered only a broken collarbone and some cuts and bruises. She had clung to the aircraft's floating debris for more than 13 hours before rescuers found her.

On June 29, passengers on the ill-fated flight left Paris on an Airbus A330 and stopped over in Marseilles. They then boarded an older A310 Airbus jet in Sana'a, Yemen's capital, and continued on to Djibouti.

The aircraft went down after a second attempt to land in the Comoros capital of Moroni.

BEA's one-line statement gave no indication of when the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder might be recovered.